CATACLYSM BABY
April 15, 2012
Mud Luscious Press
Paperback · 118 pages
5" x 7" · $12.00
ISBN 978-0-9830263-7-2
Cover Images:
Front · Front/Back
Beset with environmental disaster, animal-like children, and the failure of traditional roles, the twenty-six fathers of Cataclysm Baby raise their desperate voices to reveal the strange stations of frustrated parenthood, to proclaim familial thrashings against the fading light of our exhausted planet, its glory grown wild again. As the known world disappears, these beleaguered and all-too-breakable men cling ever tighter to the duties of an unrecoverable past, even as their children rush ahead, evolve away. Unflinching in the face of apocalypse and unblinking before the complicated gaze of parental love, Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby is a powerful chronicle of our last days, and of the tentative graces that might fill the hours of our dusk.
TRAILER: "Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella,"
a shadow play with Chris Heavener and Michelle Rider
ADVANCE PRAISE
In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. "Where do babies come from?" children ask their parents, and Cataclysm Baby has an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: "Where do they go?"
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
You can read Matt Bell’s apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns: baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. Like The Red Cavalry Stories or The Age of Wire and String, Cataclysm Baby is both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell’s brutal compassion.
—Chris Bachelder, author of Abbott Awaits
The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority—Matt Bell's collection of condensed narraticules, Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent.
—Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets
Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.
—Lucy Corin, author of The Entire Predicament
REVIEWS
How much sacrifice is required of a parent? When is it admissible to love yourself more than your child, or in another way, to fear your own death more than the death of your child? Bell doesn’t propose answers, but instead begs us to consider that a real question exists here... Ultimately, this lovely, intense book accomplished what many other non-traditional novels—and truthfully many traditional novels—fail to do: it moved me.
Cataclysm Baby is a varicolored, multi-faceted novella which transcends the tropes of ecological collapse and apocalypse, turning global catastrophe into claustrophobes of human crisis. The power of each piece alone is that it draws into itself the themes, familial forces, pathology and conflicts of the preceding chapters, then the successive story carries—like the pros and cons of all hereditary hand-me-downs—the social bacteria a step further... These are the last ditch attempts to rebuild what’s lost, mythologize what's irredeemable and finally just survive what's coming.
Bell's apocalypse is discontinuous; each tale evokes its own paradigm, its own idiom of grief. He's less interested in the invention and world-building that marks so much of sci-fi and fantasy than he is in tapping into the mythological undercurrents of end-of-the-world narratives. The short pieces in Cataclysm Baby unfold (or burst, or twist) like strange, dark fairy tales, each proposing another vision of collapse... These motifs—the end of social order, the species-transformation of new children, the utter collapse of ecological norms—run throughout Cataclysm Baby, telegraphed in Bell’s precise, concrete style.
As he did so superbly in How They Were Found, author Matt Bell takes us straight to the deepest, most difficult emotions of fatherhood and beyond: fear, grief, disappointment, letting go, betrayal, desperation... The stories of Cataclysm Baby are birth and blood, skin and fur, earth and plow, killing and death, love and sacrifice. With their terrifying premises and visceral language, these tales will not be for everyone, but those who read them cannot fail to be moved in some way.
—Jennifer Messner, Books, Personally
Cataclysm Baby—bearing some resemblance to a catalog of baby names—is nothing short of a creative success... As an allegory that focuses on the fear of parenthood and how it can be painful and destructive but also necessary for the growth of an individual as well as that of a society, Cataclysm Baby is powerful, original, and wholly mesmerizing.
—Mel Bosworth, Outsider Writers Collective
Bell’s strange, allegorical narratives take an incredibly potent, disruptive and rather terrifying look at humanity in all its beauty and weirdness, managing to be totally insane and deeply essential all at once.
An apocalyptic abecedarium that is one part baby name registry, one part S. Thompson’s Index of Folk-Motifs, one part Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It might also be effective birth control, if Uncle Sam has taken away all your other options.
Bell’s book gives name to the terrible potentials of parenthood set against a world that has fallen apart. While the waters and the temperatures are indeed rising, the real dread in Cataclysm Baby is the persistent idea that we’ll never get it right; that doomed and determined, humankind will forge ahead into whatever unknown future, bound to make the same mistakes over and over again. Permeating this bleak forecast is Bell’s sharp imagery and resonant language, which lashes us to the page and leaves us looking out beyond the end, wondering what on earth could possibly come next.
—Nicole Treska, The Coffin Factory
I can't say enough about the language. First, almost every "story" pulls itself forward in a sort of list form. Paragraphs start with phrases like "Know how" or "And then," which creates a fascinating rhythm without tiring itself out. The descriptions are both grotesque and astoundingly beautiful at the same time. As the "stories" progress... the language changes slightly, sounding more and more like they were written in the 19th century, and the fathers, none of them the same, become more and more desperate. This is what pulls the book forward.
—C.J. Opperthauser, Mud Schematic
I literally, without exaggeration, love this book... this book impressed me on a sentence-language level, paragraph-flow level, larger-scope concept level, and more. The tales inside Cataclysm Baby are dark, yet tender at the same time.
I'm among the many who think Matt Bell can do no wrong. In this "book of names," [his] tales offer an unforgettable meditation on humanness as the characters lust, consume, rage, hope, breed, betray, love, and reflect our own im/perfect impending doom.
While it seems natural to read these tales as allegories of parenthood... nevertheless I can’t help but give them a literal gloss. The horror of these tales is that, in some places within our wretched world, parentsdogive up their children for the hope of a chance of a better life. And with recent revisions to climate change forecasts, we may be well on our way to a world from Bell’s pages.
Nearly every story dog-eared, so difficult to choose my favorites, each one shining the darkness, in how brilliantly Bell handles these sick, twisted, broken children; these flailing, failing, heartbroken parents; and this world, post-apocalyptic, rolling for the edge, getting mushier and more dreadful, me both shocked at the doom portrayed and relieved for the moment to escape, momentarily at least, the cracked worlds living on.
I am still shivering from Bell's chilling profundity... Few books in print have the reach and depth these pages achieve.
—Andrea Kinnear, Tossed in My Lap
Cataclysm Baby is a compelling, quick, and complex read that will drop you into twenty-six lives and test your concept of what is humanly (or not-so-humanly) possible.
—Jason Behrends, What to Wear During an Orange Alert?
The twenty-six stories in here culminate in a bleak, frightening vision of what happens when the parental structure falls apart.
Matt Bell’s been making a name for himself through his formally inventive fiction, and this collection certainly adds to that. Mud Luscious Press has, likewise, been making a name for itself by publishing groundbreaking work for a few years now, and they’ve outdone themselves again.
To advise you to go out and buy this book, to sit down and read it right away, let the words overflow you, the environment within consume you, isn't enough. Readers will take pleasure in this book, writers will be secretly jealous.
ADDITIONAL PRESS
Booked Podcast Episode 84: Cataclysm Baby review
A video review by Caleb J. Ross
A review at Don't Ever Read Me (in Greek)
Interview at Necessary Fiction
Interview at Used Furniture Review